The commercial aircraft industry is continually looking for ways to improve aircraft fire safety. Aircraft fires can, of course, arise from a number of situations including crashes, in-flight fires caused by either passengers and/or aircraft system malfunctions, cargo compartment fires, or situations where a fire is initiated and propagated in an untended aircraft.
Improving aircraft fire safety involves the development of better and more fire-resistant construction materials. With regard to those materials which are currently used to construct interior cabin surfaces, e.g. primarily flammable materials in the passenger cabin, it has been determined fire safety is directly related to the amount of heat they release when they burn, and when they release it. For this reason, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has imposed specific heat-release requirements for such materials, although it should also be appreciated the industry has for many years conducted its own tests independently of FAA regulations in order to improve fire safety.
Dr. Edwin Smith, a Professor of Chemical Engineering at Ohio State University, invented a calorimeter which measures heat release and smoke generation rates from burning materials. This calorimeter has come to be known in the field as the "OSU calorimeter" and has been specifically designated for use by the FAA in heat release testing of cabin surface material. Unfortunately, using it to run large numbers of tests using numerous material samples has long been known to be a tedious and time-consuming process, primarily because it involves manual control of calorimeter operation and manual coordination of data acquisition with calorimeter operation. The present invention eliminates these drawbacks by providing a calorimeter of the OSU type whose functions are automatically controlled by a computer in accordance with specific user-selected inputs, and which automatically reduces data immediately upon test completion.